Chopin Piano Sonata No. 2 (The One With the Funeral March)
October 15, 202653 min · 5,545 words
Show notes
When the great pianist and composer Frederic Chopin decided to write a piano sonata in 1837, fashions had turned against the genre itself. Perhaps it was a feeling that Beethoven had essentially "finished" the genre, or perhaps it was a sense that a non-Germanic composer couldn't possibly master a form such as the Sonata, but Chopin's forays into the realm of the Piano Sonata were not generally appreciated.
Highlighted moments
The key of the sonata is B flat minor, a profoundly dark key with five flats in the key signature. But Chopin doesn't start with a B flat. Instead, he starts with a D flat, which plunges down to an E natural, a note that has very little to do with B flat minor, and actually is a tritone from it.
“The idea of calling it a sonata is a caprice, if not a gist. For he has simply bound together four of his maddest children, thus under his name smuggling them into a place into which they could not else have penetrated.”
“For 14 measures, Chopin does not change what the left hand is doing. A B-flat minor chord, followed by a G-flat, D-flat chord. But above it, the harmony shifts in blocks, each more tragic than the last, as the music becomes more and more expressive.”
“Anton Rubinstein famously described it as, quote, wind howling around the gravestones. It lasts only around a minute or two and is a perpetual motion movement with not a single chord before the very end of the piece.”
Transcript
Chopin second piano sonata overview
0:00Hello, and welcome to Sticky Notes, the classical music podcast. My name is Joshua Weilerstein. I'm a conductor, and I'm the music director of the Orchestre National de Lille and the chief conductor of the Allborg Symphony. This podcast is for anyone who loves classical music, works in the field, or is just getting ready to dive in to this amazing world of incredible music. Before we get started, I want to thank my new Patreon sponsors, Sasha, Patricia, Robert,
0:32Marilyn, Zonglun, Tim, Michael, and Maria, and all of my other Patreon sponsors for making Season 10 possible. If you'd like to support the show, please head over to patreon.com slash sticky notes podcast. And if you are a fan of the show, please take a moment to give us a rating or review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. It is greatly appreciated. So I made a little mistake two weeks ago when I said that this was the second to last episode, the Gerald Finzi episode, because that was actually the third to last episode of Season
1:0410. I have this episode today on Chopin's Second Sonata, and then in two weeks, we are going to finish Season 10 with Rachmaninoff's Second Symphony. Then there will be about a month off due to, as I've been saying, the birth of my second child. And then we are going to start re-releasing remastered episodes of the Beethoven symphonies all in a row. And then in March, the new Season 11 will begin with some really, really big repertoire. Thank you so much to everyone for all the really
1:41nice messages about this announcement. And I can't wait to start Season 11 in March. In the meantime, thank you to Cameron for sponsoring today's episode on Chopin's Second Piano Sonata. I really hope you enjoy it.
Critical reception and the funeral march
2:05When the great pianist and composer Friedrich Chopin decided to write a piano sonata in 1837, fashions had turned against the genre itself. Perhaps it was a feeling that Beethoven had essentially finished the genre. Or perhaps it was a sense that a non-Germanic composer couldn't possibly master a form such as the sonata. But Chopin's forays into the realm of the piano sonata were not generally appreciated. Robert Schumann famously said this about the sonata we're talking about today, the second. Quote,
2:37The idea of calling it a sonata is a caprice, if not a gist. For he has simply bound together four of his maddest children, thus under his name smuggling them into a place into which they could not else have penetrated. This is criticism that we'll pick apart later, because it is very specific and goes to a big challenge within the piece. Mendelssohn also didn't like this sonata, and until 1900, most of the critical reception to this sonata was negative, criticizing its supposed
3:08lack of coherence and the strange last movement in particular. As a complete piece, this second sonata was rarely played until the 20th century. But there was one movement of the sonata that was played a lot, and which has remained perhaps one of the most recognizable pieces of classical music in history. Aren't sure what I'm referring to? Well, here's the beginning of the third movement of the Chopin's second piano sonata. Yes, the Chopin Funeral March.
4:04is not a standalone piece. It's part of a sonata. And slowly, as forms became less rigid, and as experiments with tonality, and even with the inner coherence of movements became less taboo, Chopin's sonata received a critical second look, and performers began to take on the piece, not as an exercise in trying to make the rest of the sonata work around the funeral march, but as a great work in its entirety. Now, it is firmly part of the repertoire and is hailed as a masterpiece of innovation and creativity. The funeral march itself is probably in the top five
4:40most played pieces of classical music, and was played at Chopin's own funeral, as well as at the funerals of John F. Kennedy, Winston Churchill, Margaret Thatcher, Queen Elizabeth II, as well as of Soviet and communist leaders. This, of course, doesn't include the countless times the movement has been heard at funerals of lesser-known figures. It's practically a cultural meme at this point, and has been adapted thousands of times. If you think about a funeral, or about death, it's certainly possible that the
5:10Chopin Funeral March filters through your mind. But today is about much more than the funeral march. It's about exploring this whole sonata, from its scintillating first few chords, to the experiments with sonata form throughout the first movement, to the dramatic scherzo, to that funeral march, and to the frankly bizarre last movement, which is over before you even blink. We're going to talk about all this and more on this Patreon-sponsored episode, coming right up on Sticky Notes.
Compositional process and historical context
5:47Chopin's compositional process was movingly and heartbreakingly detailed by Georges Sand, one of the great French writers of the Romantic era and Chopin's longtime lover. They spent seven summers together at Sand's home, and the first of those summers was when Chopin wrote the sonata, we're going to be talking about today. Sand described Chopin's process this way,
6:22quote, His creativity was spontaneous, miraculous. He found it without seeking it, without expecting it. It arrived at his piano suddenly, completely, sublimely, or it sang in his head during a walk, and he would hasten to hear it again by recreating it on his instrument. But then would begin the most heartbreaking labor I have ever witnessed. He would shut himself up in his room for days at a time, weeping, pacing, breaking his pens, repeating or changing a single measure a hundred times,
6:54writing it and erasing it with equal frequency, and beginning again the next day with desperate perseverance. He would spend six weeks on a page, only to end up writing it just as he had done in his first outpouring. I love this quotation because it is a central point of how to appreciate Chopin's music. Chopin, like Schubert or Mozart, seems to have written music with the most natural of voices, just pouring out of him. But we can see here in Sand's account that what she witnessed
7:25seemed to be a kind of mix of the cliched artist and rapture, along with the crushing hard labor of making sure every single note is correct on the page. And then the kicker. Sand says that Chopin goes back to that initial inspiration in the end. There's no way to know how accurate this description was, but it certainly shows the level of care, and the level of self-doubt at times, and the level of rigor that Chopin subjected his music to. It would certainly have been weighing on him
7:58as he attempted to write a piano sonata, a genre that had been thoroughly dominated by Beethoven, who had only died 12 years prior to the year Chopin wrote this piece. Beethoven had so overwhelmed the music world with his symphonies, string quartets, and piano sonatas, that for many composers it was impossible to continue writing in those genres, and they were highly critical of those who continued to try. Plus, Chopin was not German, he was Polish, and so while his miniatures and other shorter pieces were always beloved and praised, when Chopin attempted to take on the bigger forms
8:33like sonatas and concerti, there was almost always withering criticism coming his way. It really shows the level of belief Chopin had in his abilities that he continued to write in larger
First movement introduction and themes
8:45forms, and that he did it so successfully. Let's go into the sonata now, which is cast in four movements, beginning with a slow introduction that has been the subject of entire analyses by 20th century theorists.
9:09Those four bars set up the fundamental tension and drama of the first movement. The key of the sonata is B flat minor, a profoundly dark key with five flats in the key signature. But Chopin doesn't start with a B flat. Instead, he starts with a D flat, which plunges down to an E natural, a note that has very little to do with B flat minor, and actually is a tritone from it. If you don't know what I'm talking about, let me explain. This tritone, which was called the devil's interval during the Baroque
9:43period, has always been symbolic of dissonance, pain, and tension due to the unresolved harmonic tension within it. Chopin starts to attempt to resolve it, though, in the next chord, which has a C sharp and a G sharp, creating a C sharp minor chord. This is a consonant chord, it's a tonal chord, regular chord, but it's still way off from B flat minor. But then, moving to an F in the bass, Chopin gets himself
10:13to an F minor seventh chord, which is the resolving note to B flat minor. Four bars, four wildly disparate harmonies, and we are thrust into this dramatic world with no preamble whatsoever. Listen to the whole introduction again. Don't worry about all the minors and majors and flats and sharps. That is not that important when you listen to this. Just immerse yourself in the turbulent music Chopin starts with, and then, where he goes with it. What follows is an extraordinarily compact movement. There's a lot of debate about the form of the
11:07movement, with most commentators landing on the idea that this is a revised version of sonata form, with two contrasting themes, a development where those themes are twisted around and manipulated, a recapitulation where the themes come back, though that's where Chopin veers away from the typical sonata form, and a coda where everything is summed up. In almost all ways, that is what Chopin does here, but he does it in his own creative way. The first theme has been described as the galloping theme, in B-flat minor and full of agitation.
11:58This theme is like hallmark Chopin, agitated but somehow beautiful and lyrical, full of dramatic contrast, and of course virtuosity for the pianist, who is playing a constant stream of eighth notes in the left hand, urging the theme along.
12:35But suddenly, all of this motion stops, and with almost no transition at all, Chopin glides into his second theme in D-flat major. It couldn't possibly be more of a contrasting theme, as Chopin opens up into a theme of total calm and repose. It's as if all of the agitation has been calmed in a single stroke. music plays
13:09For the second phrase of this second theme, Chopin starts to introduce movement again in the left hand, though it is nowhere near as agitated as in the first theme.
13:40It is a flowing accompaniment that does urge the theme on, but this time it's to a feeling of ecstasy and naked emotion, unlike the agitation and drama of the first theme. Two left-hand ideas, two completely different characters.
14:06But even though these two themes are so contrasting, it's that left-hand accompaniment that binds them together. Also present throughout both themes are triplets. And this is how Chopin will start to get to the end of the exposition section,
14:39with the two hands coming together for a leaping set of triplets that get progressively more dissonant and agitated, until we come to yet another stopping point, on a chord that should resolve to D-flat major, the key of the second theme. Except, we're at the end of the exposition now. And this moment is where there is a huge debate
Exposition repeat debate
15:24among performers, scholars, and audience members. At this point, Chopin places a repeat sign, meaning that the exposition should be repeated. But here's the problem. No one is 100% sure whether the repeat is meant to go all the way back to the beginning, with those four introductory bars included, or just back to the beginning of the main galloping theme. The Sonata was first published in three different cities, London, Paris, and Leipzig. In London and Paris, the repeat was to the very beginning of the piece.
15:55But in Leipzig, the repeat was to the galloping theme. A critical edition exists that was edited by none other than Liszt and Brahms. Not bad choices. Which shows the repeat to the beginning of the piece. But most 20th century editions of the piece used Leipzig version. This is one of those unresolved conflicts, as there is evidence for both sides being correct. It's another reminder that our idea of playing these pieces exactly as the composer would have heard them is genuinely impossible.
16:27As in cases like these, fundamental cases, such as where a repeat sign goes, there is ambiguity. Let's hear both versions. First, let's hear Martha Argerich, who does the repeat to the galloping theme.
17:05And then Mitsuko Uchida, who goes back to the beginning of the piece. In Leipzig, who does the galloping theme. In Leipzig, you can see that the Theba is being correct and the meaning of the means. They're not being correct. You can see it. Let's hear Martha Argerich, who does the galloping theme. You can see it. It's a good call. And so you can see it and listen. That's it. And so you can see it. And then you can see it. And then you can see it. When I'm on the bench. And then you can see it again.
17:36Let's hear it again. To me, harmonically, going back to the beginning makes a lot of sense, but I know people feel very strongly about this, so I'll leave it to you to decide. Another option, taken by the recording I'm using for the show today with the legendary Arthur Rubenstein, is to just skip the repeat altogether and head right into the development. This also makes some sense, as if you do take the repeat,
18:06the introduction and exposition last around four minutes, and the entire rest of the movement is just three minutes, which makes it slightly lopsided, though there is a reason for that as well, which we will get to in a moment. These are the decisions that keep performers up at night, and I do think they have an impact on the audience, even if all of this stuff about repeats and things like that seem esoteric or insular. The decision whether to repeat two minutes of music in a seven-minute movement, or a five-minute movement, is a big one. So listen out for it next time you hear this piece.
Development and recapitulation
18:39All right, let's go to the development now. The development is unlike a Beethovenian stormy development section, and instead is enigmatic, full of whispered ideas from the exposition. The galloping theme is always threatening, but it is always answered by calming figures that are based on the harmonies of the second theme, and the rhythm of the introductory four bars.
19:20There are even moments where the second theme is played, while the galloping theme accompanies it in the left hand. The harmony is quite unstable, changing almost every moment, and it gives us the feeling that this music is totally lost. It's like it's got the fundamental elements in place, but it just keeps searching for a way to integrate them. There are huge outbursts that are almost immediately subdued. Something's happening, but we don't know what. And suddenly, as if it can no longer hold itself in,
20:06we do get a Beethovenian outburst that sends us on to stormy seas. The virtuosity here is astonishing, with the galloping theme in the right hand and leaping triplets in the left. I'm a professional violinist and conductor, and yet when I see music like this, I can't believe that one person can actually play it. Let's look. Let's look at the piano music like this from the anthony musicule. People can probably do this with death as well.
20:39Let's get to the piano music like this by drunken doing stuff, taking off, because people love him having the same thing. We love the songs from the anthony musicub, and to the beginning niemals. And then, just as the music threatens to spill out of control, Chopin calms it down and surprises us.
21:21Yes, that's the second theme. Chopin, in his big break from traditional sonata form, skips the opening theme in his recapitulation and goes right to the second theme, but this time in B-flat major. This makes a lot of structural sense, as the development was so dominated by the galloping idea that it might have been too much to repeat it again.
21:52And this is where, actually, I would argue that taking the repeat makes a lot of sense, too. Otherwise, you only hear the galloping theme one time in the whole movement. But now into the recap, second theme, which is as gorgeous and satisfying as it was the first time around.
22:13The Leaping Triplets It's return as well, but now we know that we're going somewhere different than we did at the end of the exposition.
22:47It's the coda now, and Chopin has created a whirlwind of momentum. The Leaping Triplets Thank you.
23:26That might not have been what you expected, though, right? The galloping theme returns in the coda, but just in the bass, as Chopin pushes the music more and more forward. We might have expected a kind of violent and climactic conclusion, but instead with a series of chords, Chopin arrives into B-flat major with a kind of bloody triumph, but a triumph that feels completely unresolved.
23:56The writer, Michislav Tomaszewski, says this, quote, The first movement in the B-flat minor sonata ends with a series of chords played triple fortissimo, but a sensitive listener feels that nothing has really ended here yet, that the closing cadence of the Allegro has not concluded the drama.
Scherzo movement and character
24:13This was barely the opening act. So as the curtain closes on this first act, let's go to the second, a scherzo. The scherzo has no tempo indication, but it actually makes some sense, as the beginning of this movement seems to be a result of the intensity and slight lack of resolution of the first movement.
24:47I'm a bit puzzled by those who say that this sonata has four standalone movements, when the scherzo has so much in common with the character of the first movement. The movement itself is in the standard scherzo form of a big A section with a contrasting middle section. The A section begins loudly, but somehow in a slightly subdued way, considering the register of the piano that Chopin starts in. It is in G-flat major, an even darker key than the first movement. But after some gentle leaping around the keyboard, we come to rest on a D-flat.
25:19And now the true drama begins. Moods. Moods. Moods. Moods. Thank you.
25:52As you heard, Chopin has transformed music that seemed a bit more playful at the outset into music of tremendous drama. Just that figure of da-da-da-da-dum, which was cheerful at first, is now driving and dangerous. It's the power of Chopin to be able to do that just with harmony while keeping exactly the same rhythm. Listen again also to the tremendous virtuosity required to play this section.
26:24A series of chromatic scales is followed by a punishing series of octaves, one of the hardest successive things to play on the piano.
26:58Chopin was one of the greatest composers of his time, not just because of pretty melodies, but because of the way he was able to use the virtuosic capabilities of the piano to create more dramatic music. This isn't mere pyrotechnics to impress. The scales up create dramatic intensity, and the octaves and even the sense of effort we get from the pianist playing them ramp up that drama even more. And when the pianist is somewhat released into a big tune, it's all the more satisfying.
27:28That is virtuosity used for a musical purpose, practically a trademark of Chopin's music. The coda of the scherzo is a return back to that driving four-eighth note quarter note rhythm,
28:01with an added touch of violent accents that completely unsettle our sense of the barline. All of this for one final collapse into E-flat minor, one of the darkest keys in all of music. The trio section is another world entirely.
Scherzo trio section
28:28In G-flat major, Chopin unfolds a glorious and songful melody that fills one with warmth. We've heard nothing like it in the piece so far, and it is a balm, with the simplest possible oom-pa-pa accompaniment, and that sense of total flow and calm. This is an extraordinary moment. One more.
28:55One more. One more. One more.
29:09One more. Here, there is criticism of Chopin for a bit of incoherence, and maybe it's warranted, since this music is so wildly contrasting from the scherzo music, but actually, I see it differently. There are plenty of examples in the classical era of hugely dramatic scherzo sections being followed by major key or brighter trio middle sections. It's only in the romantic
29:43era where the expectation was to keep the character slash narrative going without a break. So in my mind, Chopin is harking back to a different era in this middle section, one where you were allowed to change characters and stop the progression of the narrative momentarily.
30:07As the writer Oren Howard says, quote, The middle section is a major key jewel in a Chopin crown studded with such invaluable gems.
30:40The small harmonic changes and surprises just overwhelm you with their beauty. The change between major and minor, the slight dissonances, and yet the overriding feeling is of a never-ending beauty with the pianist lost in a dream.
31:02The transition back to the scherzo music is one of those harmonic shifts that should make your blood run cold. It's a remarkable moment, and it leads us straight back into that anxious world of the scherzo.
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32:24The rest of the scherzo proceeds as the first section did, until the very end of the movement, where Chopin really puts in place what he wants you to remember from this movement. As things seem to be spilling out of control, Chopin suddenly puts the brakes on and magically modulates the key to G-flat major, bringing back the middle section music.
32:55It's like a thought that Chopin left unfinished and needed to resolve again. And with a calm wind-down, the movement ends in total peace. Basically the last place we would have expected it to land. . . . . . . . . . . . .
33:35. . . . . .
Funeral march context and form
33:45And this will lead us to that famous funeral march, but now we understand it in context to the rest of the sonata. We've had a hugely dramatic first movement that nevertheless was suffused with light.
34:18And it ended in this unresolved bombast and triumph. And we had a scherzo which was pulsing with energy and excitement, but was overwhelmed by the beauty and introspection of the middle section. Now as the funeral march begins, does it feel different than when we hear it out of this context? . . . .
34:50. . . . . . . . . On a formal level, the funeral march couldn't be simpler. The A section which you just listened to the beginning of, a contrasting B section, and the return of the A section. In fact, it's very similar to the form of the second movement. And this music is deeply related to the first two movements, though the connections are subtle.
35:24This is because Chopin wrote this funeral march first, and then the rest of the sonata two years later. So in essence, everything in this sonata was built out of the elements of the funeral march, whether those elements are referenced or not. As Mityoslav Tomaszewski says, The music begins with a repeated B-flat, a tolling of a bell, which slowly develops into the theme,
36:03which is a reversed version of the opening theme of the first movement. . . . . . . . . . .
36:33For 14 measures, Chopin does not change what the left hand is doing. A B-flat minor chord, followed by a G-flat, D-flat chord. But above it, the harmony shifts in blocks, each more tragic than the last, as the music becomes more and more expressive. We get the sense that the funeral cortege is nearing us as this music progresses. . . . . . . . . .
37:17. . . Suddenly, a more open expression of grief emerges, with powerful scales and crunching dissonances. This is a moment for me of desperation, of wailing.
37:51Many sources I consulted about this show talked about the way this music is so familiar that it is hard to take its character seriously. And I get it. The movement has been transcribed nearly 500 times.
38:22It's been used in cartoons and comedy and in extremely trite and sentimental movies and TV shows, rendering this music so famous that it can be hard to understand why people loved it in the first place. But just like Beethoven's Fifth, there's a reason this music is so famous. It evokes something so profoundly tragic that it immediately hooked listeners, even if they didn't like the rest of the sonata. And to me, just like with Beethoven V, where the first movement's relentless energy is made all the more powerful by its connection with the other three movements,
38:55this Chopin movement gains its strongest sense of tragedy and despair by its connection with the rest of the sonata. It's impossible not to take this music seriously when you hear it in context. Oh, this is fascinating. And then with one of the most magical and yet simple transitions possible,
39:41Chopin uses one single A-flat to modulate the D-flat major and brings us as much solace as the funeral music brought us to spare. It's just an amazing moment. Tomaszewski describes this music as, quote, defenseless.
40:11This movement is inevitably compared to the funeral march from Beethoven's Eroica Symphony. And it's a good comparison, especially with this major key middle section. Beethoven's funeral march is a bit more formally complicated, but it also features that dream of a second theme.
40:45¶¶ ¶¶
Adaptations and trio return
40:57One of the more obscure, but in my mind most powerful adaptations of this music came in a symphony I never tire of talking about, Pavel Haas' unfinished symphony. Haas, a Czech-Jewish composer whose 1938 composition of his symphony was interrupted by his deportation to Theresienstadt and subsequent murder in Auschwitz,
41:35wrote in his second movement a powerful satire on the invading Nazis, and included this middle section of the Chopin Sonata as a cantalena line over a mocking version of the Nazi national anthem, the Hearst Wessel lead. It's one of the most powerful moments of satire in all of music, and never fails to stun audiences when they hear it. ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶
42:09¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ But back to Chopin. Honestly, this theme is too simple, too naive, to really be discussed in a helpful way. So I think the best thing to do is just to listen to it. ¶¶
42:40¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ The second part of the trio momentarily disabuses us of our naivete and brings us back to reality
43:18for a moment with some powerful dissonances. But in the end, Chopin turns away from them and contents himself with this magical world that he has created.
43:39The second part of the trio momentarily disabuses us of our naivete.
44:10But we all know what's coming. The dream ends and the funeral march returns with no mercy. At first, it is a repeat of what we heard before, though some pianists add more dynamic variety here than in the first iteration of the march, as if it is fully upon us now.
44:39The third part of the trio momentarily disabuses us of our naivete. The third part of the trio momentarily disabuses us of our naivete. And then the end of this movement arrives
45:17with no preamble, no coda, no transition. It's as if the cortege passes us into the distance and at a certain point, we just can't hear it anymore.
45:47. . . Some pianists ignore Chopin's written dynamics here, and get softer and softer, as if to
46:22mimic the fading away of the cortege. But this brings up one more interesting facet of this music, which is that Chopin really
46:53didn't like narrative associations to be made with his pieces, and Chopin actually removed the word funeral from the title of the movement in 1840. At the same time, this movement was deeply important to him. In an unsettling letter he wrote to Solange Klessinger, the daughter of Georges Sand, he said this, quote, When I was playing my sonata in B-flat minor amidst a circle of English friends, an unusual experience befell me. I executed the allegro and scherzo more or less correctly, and was just about to start
47:25the funeral march, when suddenly I saw emerging from the half-opened case of the piano the cursed apparitions that had appeared to me one evening in the Chartreuse on Mallorca. I had to go out for a moment to collect myself, after which, without a word, I played on. There is something eerie, even supernatural, about this music, especially its total lack of adornment and its spare character. There's not one superfluous note in the whole movement,
47:55and its impact in the right performance can be devastating. The end of the night, the end of the night, the end of the night, the end of the night, the end of the night, the end of the night, the end of the night, the end of the night, the end of the night.
Final movement and concluding thoughts
48:07This brings us to that last movement. Anton Rubinstein famously described it as, quote, wind howling around the gravestones.
48:39It lasts only around a minute or two and is a perpetual motion movement with not a single chord before the very end of the piece. The form? It's pretty much undefined. The great pianist Garrick Olson said that the movement is, quote, extraordinary, because he's written the weirdest movement he's ever written in his whole life, something which truly looks to the 20th century and post-romanticism an atonality. I think the best thing to do is to listen to it in its entirety, especially now that we have the context of the first three movements.
49:11Strap in. Strap in. Strap in. Strap in. Thank you.
49:56Thank you.
50:26That's a wild ride, isn't it? Chopin marks for the music to be played sotto voce, or whispering, and doesn't actually write any volume indications until that fortissimo last chord. So it's up to the pianist to decide. Do you whisper your way through it, or add dynamics? I'm not sure which is right, but Rubenstein's performance is astonishing in its virtuosity and its smooth legato playing.
50:57And that's the way this sonata ends, in this two-minute whirlwind, which almost sounds like a coda to the funeral march. In the end, though, of course I have unbounded respect and admiration for Robert Schumann, I have to disagree with him, and with many other critics, about the supposed incoherence of this sonata. It's certainly not a sonata in the manner of Beethoven's piano sonatas, but maybe it's a bit more like his late quartets, which appended form entirely and took us into the cosmos with, in my opinion, the most astonishing music ever written.
51:28To me, Chopin is in some ways aiming for that in this sonata, especially in the final two movements, with their compact, succinct nature and profound emotional depth. This is a masterpiece through and through, and it's been especially satisfying to be able to talk you through the other three movements, considering how famous the funeral march is. Thank you to Cameron for sponsoring today's episode, and thanks to Charlie Cosella, as always, for mixing the show. And thank you for listening to Sticky Notes today.
51:59We'll have one more episode in Season 10 coming up for you in a couple of weeks, so don't miss it. It's a live recording of my podcast with the Allborg Symphony on Rachmaninoff's Second Symphony, so please don't miss that episode. If you'd like to support the podcast monetarily during this hiatus, you can head over to patreon.com slash stickynotespodcast, and of course, whenever you want to get in touch, you can at stickynotespodcast at gmail.com. Thanks so much, and I'll talk to you again after a while.
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